This
question hardly exists as far as the mainstream media are concerned, and until
now those who have raised it have generally been dismissed as sore losers and
gripers. However, many left-liberals and radicals are raising the question and
answering it in the negative, and they are producing convincing arguments to
back their analysis. See, for example, Jim Hightower’s article in the December
Hightower Lowdown and the article by Elizabeth Schulte in the November 5, 2004,
Socialist Worker,weekly paper of the
International Socialist Organization (ISO). In the December issue of In
These Times Greg Palast also proposes that Bush
stole the election. One of the most convincing articles in this vein is “Let’s
Get Real” by Mark Crispin Miller—also in the December issue of In These
Times. Since Miller’s article succinctly summarizes this view, I will quote
from it and paraphrase it.

He
says: “Bush and company’s theft of the election was a crime so obvious that it
requires more effort to deny than affirm.” As evidence he cites the following:
the way Bush won in 2000; the ease with which election results can be changed
without a trace; the fact that Diebold, Sequoia, and
ES&S, the major manufacturers of touch-screen voting machines and central
tabulators, are owned and operated by Bush Republicans, who made their partisan
intentions known; the tabulations of the exit polls, which turned out to be
mistaken only in the swing states (exit polls have been historically accurate);
the weird inflation of the Bush vote in county after county where the number of
votes was higher than the number of voters; the chicanery of the Bush
supporters who ran the central polling station in Ohio’s Warren County; the
numerous accounts of vote fraud during early voting coast to coast in the weeks
prior to the election; the fact that almost every glitch or error favored Bush;
the countless uncounted or thrown-away provisional ballots; 4 million civilian
votes abroad mishandled by the Pentagon, which had mysteriously taken over this
job from the State Department; the many dirty tricks perpetrated on Black and
other minority communities; fake voter registration drives; and machines that
translated votes for Kerry into votes for Bush.

I
remember watching Bush, on the eve of the 2000 elections, as he confidently and
threateningly told reporters, while smirking at the television cameras, “You
know something, we are gonna win Florida. Mark my
words. You can write it down.” This interview later showed up in Michael
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary.

Further
in this vein, James K. Galbraith writes in his article “Democracy Inaction” in
the January 1–15, 2005, issue of the Progressive Populist, “If U.S. officials
who are complaining about election fraud in Ukraine applied the same standards
in Ohio, then our own presidential election certainly
was stolen.” Galbraith lists a chorus of people who he says are now questioning
the results. This includes Secretary of State Colin Powell, Republican Senator
Lugar of Indiana, former national security adviser ZbigniewBrzezinski, and Stephen Lee Myers of the New York
Times. Galbraith points out that, like Katharine Harris, Florida’s secretary of
state and chairman of Bush’s 2000 campaign in that state, the secretary of
state of Ohio was also coincidentally cochairman of Bush’s Ohio campaign. He
and other Republicans across Ohio systematically obstructed the vote count by
holding back additional voting machines from predominantly Democratic and
inner-city precincts and by harassing Black voters. Galbraith writes: “So where
is the press?” Does one have to ask any more?

I had
personally anticipated a healthy win for Kerry given the massive mobilization
of progressive forces in the stampede to defeat Bush. While it is true that the
right has learned from the Democratic progressives and studied and adopted many
of their methods of grassroots organizing, I disagree with a point made by Bill
Fletcher (see the Labor Standard web site for his speech at a November antiwar
conference in Connecticut). I still do not think it possible that they
“out-mobilized” (as Fletcher puts it) the Kerry campaign, the labor movement,
and every single mass reform organization in America. Factors that did work to
inflate the Bush vote were virtual Republican control of the capitalist media,
the support of the Christian right, the propaganda that generated fear in
people and convinced them that they would be safer with Bush as President and
the limitless funding that was put at Bush’s disposal by the ruling elite.
However, even with these factors I do not believe it was enough to put him over
the top without significant and effective vote fraud.

It is
significant that a suit has been filed in Ohio for a recount. A December 22
Internet press release by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman,
authors of a forthcoming book entitled Ohio’s Stolen Election: Voices of the
Disenfranchised 2004, has this subheading: “Ohio electoral fight becomes the
‘biggest deal since Selma’ as GOP stonewalls.” They say, in part: “As Republican
officials stonewall subpoenas and subvert the recount process, Rev. Jesse
Jackson has pronounced Ohio’s vote fraud fiasco ‘the biggest deal since Selma’
and has called for a national rally at ‘the scene of the crime’ in Columbus
[Ohio’s capital] January 3. Meanwhile, volunteer attorneys have poured into
Columbus from around the US to help investigate the bitterly contested presidential
vote that has allegedly given George W. Bush Ohio’s electoral votes and thus a
second term. A lawsuit filed at the Ohio Supreme Court charges that a fair vote
count would give the state and the presidency to John Kerry rather than Bush.”

They
also report: “Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and other members of the Congressional
Black Caucus have strongly questioned Bush’s purported victory, pointing out
that more than half the votes cast in Ohio and the nation were recorded on
electronic voting machines owned by Republicans, with no audit trail.”

Where is the Democratic Party?

During
the last two presidential elections I have gotten the distinct impression that
the Democrats’ top leadership did not really care to win and that they pretty
much threw the elections. It is true that they have a dearth of charismatic
candidates from which to choose; also, the Democrats have abandoned major
sections of their historic positions (the Roosevelt-era “New Deal” in particular),
leaving no consistent reform line on anything; they flip-flop on issues all
over the place; and their base in labor has been weakened due to the decline of
organized labor. And they themselves are just as responsible as the Republicans
for the decline of organized labor due to their own pro-corporate policies. But
even after adding all these factors together, this cannot account for their
losses in 2002 and in 2004 when you consider the widespread hatred of Bush
among the electorate and the unprecedented mobilization of the grassroots to
oust him.

I
think the Bush victory required the acquiescence, if not outright collaboration,
of the Democratic Party. Vote fraud on the part of the Republicans has gone
uncontested and virtually unmentioned by the top Democratic Party leadership,
which continues to participate in the cover-up. Both Gore in 2000 and Kerry in
2004 were in an obvious and curious rush to concede and offer their wholehearted
cooperation to the Bush regime.

Michael
Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 showed us the appalling images of Gore lowering
the gavel on the Black representatives attempting to get a hearing on the debacle
in Florida, overruling any discussion of the question on the day the joint
session of the House of Representatives and the Senate was to certify the election
results. The film script says, “Al Gore in his dual role as outgoing vice
president and president of the Senate, presided over the event that would officially
anoint George W. Bush as the new president” of the United States, thus assuring
Gore’s own exclusion from the presidency.

I am
convinced that the Democratic Party has felt that it can play a far more important
role in trapping dissent by staying out of office in these times when
capitalist cost cutting, layoffs, and imperialist aggression have become absolutely
necessary to the survival of the capitalist system. It appears that the Democrats’
top leaders prefer to let the Republicans take the heat while they skillfully
use the mobilization of the anti- Bush grassroots to expand and deepen their
stranglehold on movements for progressive social change in this country.

There
is no question in my mind that the capitalist class is more aware than “the
left” and those who favor independent political action that a Democratic Party
administration that wins and is thereby forced to assume the responsibility to
prosecute an unpopular war and to assume the major responsibility for more
anti-labor and reactionary legislation (which, of course, the Democrats have
been supporting all along) would set the stage for an unprecedented move toward
independent political action and a break from the two major parties. I think
that they are very aware that this country is absolutely pregnant with disgust
for the Democrats and Republicans. In the September 2004 issue of the AARP
magazine (America’s largest circulation magazine) it was reported that 56% of
baby boomers say the country needs a strong third party and that 47% of the “Silent
Generation” (those aged 58–69) agree.

I
remember Peter Camejo at a meeting in Boston in the
1960s explaining that there are not two major parties in this country, only one
(with two heads). To explain his contention he asserted that if the Democrats
were truly a “liberal” oppositional party to the frankly pro-business
Republicans, the Democrats would have expelled their conservative wing
represented by and large by the Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats),
representing the white racist, Jim Crow, conservative political system that
dominated in the former Confederacy until the civil rights movement won voting
rights for Blacks in the South in the late 1960s. But now instead of the Dixiecrats being the conservative wing of the Democratic
Party, it’s the so-called Democratic Leadership Council.

A big
change occurred after the civil rights movement won voting rights for Southern
Blacks. Before that, the white racist vote in the South was usually cast in a
solid bloc for the Democrats, but today the former Confederacy votes for Bush.
That’s because in the 1970s the Nixon and Goldwater Republicans adopted the
“Southern strategy,” luring the white-racist Southern conservative Bible belt
vote over to their side, the former “party of Lincoln.”

Nevertheless,
forty years ago, the Democrats refused to drive out their own conservative Dixiecrat wing when given the opportunity to do so by the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic delegation representing 80,000 newly registered Southern
Black voters at the 1964 Democratic Party convention. Camejo
explained that the conservative wing in the Democratic Party (which now and
since the 1980s has been represented mainly by the Democratic Leadership
Council) acts as the mechanism whereby the party can usher in reactionary
legislation when necessary by merely having its conservative wing bloc with the
Republicans on any issue, leaving the majority of allegedly “liberal” Democrat
politicians smelling sweet as a rose, to preserve the party’s image as a
supposed advocate of progressive social change and hoodwinking the populace.

This
kind of mechanism is something they intend to and must keep in place. The
Democrats and the Republicans could not fail to take note of the slavish support
exhibited by the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party in spite of the
fact that the “progressive” were not thrown a single crumb in the way of platform
concessions at the Democrats’ 2004 convention in order to maintain that
loyalty. The conservative, pro-business leaders of the Democratic Party must be
pleased indeed that their con game continues to work so well.

In
this regard the “left-liberals” have the Bush threat all wrong. I agree with
Malcolm X, who pointed out with his wolf-and-fox analogy that it is only the
Democrats who are able to lull the electorate to sleep and thereby represent a
greater danger to the fight for social reform than any Republican candidate
ever could. As Fidel Castro, in a January 2000 interview with Federico Mayor Zaragoza, former UNESCO director general, said , “[The] United States, such a vocal advocate of
multiparty systems, has two parties thatare so perfectly similar in their methods, objectives and goals that
they have practically created the most perfect one-party system in the world.
Over 50 % of the people in that ‘democratic country’ do not even cast a vote,
and the team that manages to raise the most funds often wins, with the votes of
only 25% of the electorate. The political system is undermined by disputes,
vanity and personal ambition or by interest groups operating within the
established economic and social model, and there is no real alternative for a
change in the system.” (Quoted in a book of speeches, etc.,
by Fidel Castro, War, Racism, and Economic Injustice: Global Ravages of
Capitalism, Ocean Press, 2002.)

Questions Vote Fraud Raises

If it
is true that Bush stole yet another election—and I am convinced that is the
case—then it confronts all the movements for social change in this country with
a series of new issues to deal with. If it is so easy to steal votes from the other
major party, what does that say for the electoral prospects of a fledgling
third party effort? It raises the whole question of the legitimacy of the
electoral process itself, and it places the question of a fight for fair elections
on the agenda. In anticipation of making the fight for a Labor Party or for
independent labor candidates a reality Labor party advocates must begin to deal
with issues of electoral reform and ballot laws. The League of Women Voters
(LWV), which has been a pretty consistent liberal organization that has
attempted to maintain the democratic electoral process. LWV policy might be
influenced to advocate ballot measures that would make it easier for third parties
or independent candidates to run in elections. The League is made up of
mainstream Democrats and some Republicans who believe in fair elections and who
historically used to run the major candidates’ debates.

However,
the presidential debates that the League used to run were dumped by the two
major parties when the Democrats and Republicans moved to take over the
presidential debates from them and exclude other candidates years ago. The women
report at their meetings that the days are gone when the candidates would have
to attend their debates. These days the major candidates don’t even bother to
attend community meetings where they might be confronted with disturbing questions.
The League has come out against touch screen voting machines and the Electoral
College and takes positions on a whole series of issues from peace, to ethics,
to human rights and urban sprawl. They are just beginning to deal with the
questions raised by Florida and the 2004 elections.

In
addition, we are seeing the growth of massive new Internet-driven organizations,
created specifically to monitor and assure democratic elections since the
debacle in 2000. Vote fraud and stolen elections are by no means new to American
politics, but since the Florida debacle there is intense new interest in this
issue.

According
to Ralph Nader, who spoke in Connecticut on December 23, his campaign apparatus
will be using the Nader/Camejo campaign experience to
lay the groundwork to call for election law reforms, including the demand for
one national law that establishes standard voting regulations for all states in
national elections.

Does the Election Represent a Move to the Right?

Certainly
not, if you don’t believe Bush won. But as others have pointed out, nothing has
really changed, and the vote certainly was a referendum for a liberal agenda in
the cosmopolitan and industrial areas of the country, even though there was no
major candidate campaigning for such an agenda. It is clear that “the right” is
not winning in the key areas of the country that matter and that typically lead
the country. Now it’s crystal clear why the capitalist class maintains the
Electoral College as an effective mechanism meant to disenfranchise the working
class, the Black community, and other oppressed sectors of the population,
which did turn out in record numbers. The rigged structure of the Electoral
College gives undue influence to the more sparsely populated, rural, and
backward parts of the United States, as it was designed to do.

As David Riehle so aptly put it:
“In terms of labor strategy it is crucial to realize that the working class
voting pattern discussed here is only superficially a ‘Democrat’ vote—rather it
is a class and trade union vote, that is, a vote that follows the
recommendations of organized labor.
What has diminished it in terms of exacting electoral majorities is not the
weakening of the ability of organized labor to influence its constituency, but deindustrialization.”
In addition, I think the votes in the so-called red states, to the extent that
they are not the result of fraud, represent, along with conservative small business
and other petty bourgeois elements, the unorganized and uneducated layers of
the working class that are easy prey for the simplistic propaganda of demagogues,
and as Bill Fletcher has pointed out, it also represents a racist vote.

More
significant in any election is the approximately 50%–60% of the electorate that
doesn’t vote. Many liberals berate those who don’t enact the charade at the
polls on a regular basis and incorrectly conclude that they are apolitical,
conservative, or ignorant. A far more realistic explanation is that they recognize
that they in fact do not have a real choice and have become too cynical to
participate. This does not suggest a move to the right. I believe that it is
this section of the populace which constitutes the greatest potential for a
voter registration drive spearheaded by a labor party or other working class
party.

The Same-Sex Marriage Question

Many
have correctly pointed out that large numbers of the Christian right who went
to the polls were motivated by a desire to defeat the legalization of same-sex
marriage. However, I do not believe this constitutes a setback on this issue or
a radical turn to the right. What it represents is a very real and strong
backlash against the gains that have been made by the gay and lesbian community
in bringing human rights issues to the fore and consolidating them in legislation.
The fact that this issue was skyrocketed into people’s consciousness almost
overnight is an indication of a move to the left and not the right. Gains are
seldom made without generating some form of a backlash and this case is no
exception.

Significance of Women’s Voting Patterns

Ellen
Hawkes in the winter 2004/2005 issue of MS
magazine analyses the 2004 electorate using the exit poll results of the
National Election Pool (a consortium of the major television networks and the
Associated Press, a system constructed to avoid the problems in projections
encountered in the 2000 election). “During election day waves of exit polls
were leaked, which indicated a strong Kerry lead nationally and in both Florida
and Ohio. Once the actual votes began to come in from the East and Midwest,
Bush took the lead.” She notes that despite a smaller gender gap than had
existed in 2000 the women’s vote was significant in this election due to the
fact that women voted for Kerry 51% to 48% while men voted for Bush 55% to 44%
representing a gender gap of 7 percent compared to one of 10 percentage points
in 2000.

She
also refers to the Lake Snell Perry Election Eve Omnibus survey of 1,000 voters
in which both Democratic and Republican women felt that the candidates did not
talk about women’s issues. They wanted to hear about equal pay 60%, violence against
women 58%, and women’s equality under the law 60%. “Where women’s votes made
the difference for Kerry gender gaps ranged from 16 points in Oregon to 5
points in Michigan,” said Ellie Smeal, president of
the Feminist Majority Foundation. The fact that Kerry did not forcefully
address the issues women wanted to hear about resulted in a decrease in the
pro-Democrat “gender gap” from the 2000 election. The National Organization for
Women and the abortion rights groups launched a massive “get out the vote
campaign,” which resulted in an increase in the number of unmarried women
voters from 19% to 23% of the electorate. In 2004, 7.5 million more unmarried
women (who voted for Kerry 62 percent to 37 percent) and married women (who
voted for Kerry 55% to 44%) took to the polls. The MS article states,
“It should be noted too, that unmarried men voted for Kerry 53% to 44%, and
married men voted for Bush 59% to 40%, representing a marriage gap within the
gender gap.” Thus it is clear that if Kerry had campaigned vigorously on behalf
of women, he would have increased his vote dramatically. But obviously there’s
a reason he didn’t campaign vigorously on women’s issues. It’s because he and
his party are basically committed to the status quo, not to women’s liberation.

Behavior of “Progressive” Democrats

It is
clear that masses of Americans, as indicated by the AARP polls and the dissatisfaction
of women and minority voters, are open to the idea of a third party movement.
Yet in spite of these indications, the “progressive Democrats” in circles
around In These Times, the Nation, and the Progressive, to name a few, cling
more fanatically to their program of “reclaiming” the Democratic Party.

According
to Bill Onasch, “More than 400 self-styled
‘progressives’ met during the final days of the Democrat convention in Boston.
Howard Dean was there and apparently had a good time. So were three members of
Congress: John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, and Barbara Lee. Frank Llewellyn,
National Director, Democratic Socialists of America, played a role. Other well-knowns included Tom Hayden, Medea
Benjamin, and Granny D. They launched a new organization, Progressive Democrats
of America.” I won’t go into the irony of this gathering taking place as
antiwar demonstrators were being herded into cages in the downtown area
surrounding the DP convention. Onasch discusses the
contradictions of this group adequately in his article.

But I
must add that this liberal elite, educated, possessed of numerous financial
resources, media access, magazines, Internet influence, and talent cannot begin
to contemplate breaking with the Democrats and setting up their own party,
based on the program they claim to profess. In fact it is a tragi-comedy
that almost the entire labor bureaucracy, the leadership of the major mass organizations
for social change, the current leadership of the Black community, and most of
“the left” cannot imagine independent political action. In fact they argue
against it, saying that it is impossible in the richest, most educated country
in the world, to do what hundreds of thousands of working people in other more
impoverished areas of the globe have done historically—to launch successful
political parties to represent their interests.

Why
is it that these types, who could successfully lead a break from the two major
parties, act impotent in the face of a ruling class assault against any independent
political action, much less independent working class political action? In fact
most of these elements saved their most vicious vituperation not for Kerry but
for the Nader/Camejo campaign as almost every
“progressive” magazine had at least one Nader-bashing
article urging him not to run and predicting dire consequences if he did. While
they all remained silent as Kerry called for more troops and voted for the
Patriot Act they wrote scandalous articles questioning Nader/Camejo’s
right to run, labeling them “spoilers” for exercising their democratic rights
to participate in the elections. They remained silent as the Democratic Party
took action to remove Nader’s campaign from the ballot
in state after state.

I
agree with Fred Feldman, who points out in his article “Bush’s Election Has
Decided Nothing” (see Labor Standard web
site) that
there is a material basis for the loyalty of so-called “progressives” to the
Democratic Party and the capitalist system that party defends. “The United
States is a privileged nation in the world, as a consequence of its substantial
and ongoing world hegemony. The benefits of imperialist domination do affect
the whites, including workers, disproportionately. But all classes of all
nationalities are affected, not just workers, and not just workers of the
dominant nationality. After all, the reason why all the immigrants come here is
to be in the places that imperialist super profits go rather than the places
from which they are taken. They need a piece of that action, and many of
them—like the rest of us—do get some.” In this sense it is the privileged
layers of the working class and the middle class (small business people,
professionals, etc.) in this country who make up the constituency of the
Democratic Party and who defend their perceived privileges by supporting it
again and again.

However,
many of these so-called “leaders” are failing to notice that these historic
privileges are being whittled away, making their continued support of the
Democratic Party pathetic and absurd. Mark Dudzic,
Labor Party national organizer, had it right in his recent article “After the
Elections, What Next?”

“Labor
needs its own political party. The opening lines of our Electoral Policy say it
best: ‘The Labor Party is unlike any other party in the United States. We stand
independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. Our overall strategy is
for the majority of American people—working class people—to take political
power.’ And here we must be frank: we do not have an effective Labor Party in
this country because the labor movement has not met the challenge of creating
and sustaining one. That is the task at hand.” Dudzic
is right that a decisive sector of the trade union movement in this country has
not yet risen to meet this decisive challenge.

Dudzic says
further:

“The
labor movement contributed massive amounts of time, energy and resources to the
failed Kerry campaign. In four years, we will be expected to contribute even
more to the next Democratic candidate. We need to learn from the example of
right wing social activists and invest in building a real base around boldly
articulated issues. If we move our activists and organizations into well-financed
strategic national campaigns around issues of concern to all working people, if
we declare our political independence, we can change the national political
landscape.”

Role of the American Left

The
continued support of the Democratic Party is even more pathetic and absurd when
advocated by such leaders of the organized “left” in this country as the
Communist Party (CPUSA) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This is
also true of a significant section of the leadership of the Green Party. It is
to the credit of the leaders and members of the Workers World Party and the
International Socialist Organization that they refused to join the stampede of
the Anybody But Bush advocates.

Greater
collaboration is needed among the small forces around the Workers World Party,
the more independent Greens, the International Socialist Organization members,
the radicals around the Nader/Camejo campaign, the
elements who supported the misnamed “Million Worker March,” and the Labor Party
leadership and membership. It seems to me that these forces could—and ought
to—join hands to launch a real third party effort based on the working class
and on independence from control by corporate Big Business.

It
will take young and old, Black and white, male and female, all united around a
program that represents the interests of working people in this country against
the ravages of corporate globalization and impoverishment. To say that this
cannot be accomplished in the richest nation on the globe by the most educated
working class in the history of the world is craven, pessimistic, negative
thinking by those who cannot imagine standing up to the powerful rulers of the
world. We must not organize “to take back the Democratic Party,” which never
was ours to begin with (it was always a party controlled by the ruling class).
We must organize to reclaim the powerful resources at the disposal of the working
class, which are being squandered by false leaders throwing good money after
bad supporting capitalist politicians.

The
idea of a Labor Party is an idea whose time has come. Those visionaries who can
see the full potential for such a development must step out boldly to carry out
this historic task. There is no more pressing issue confronting the globe than
for the movements for social change to break with the Democrats and Republicans
and begin to assemble the forces who can build a party representing the
interests of not just the American working class but the world working class.
Without this development occurring in the near future the prospects for humanity
are dim indeed.